You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
11th May 1950.
Dear Dr. Scott:
I think your students are trying to tell you something that I really have said. You will understand that I am extremely keen on penal reform and what I am saying when talking to students is part of the effort towards penal reform. The point that your students refer to is not one that I have made carefully in a published paper although I have often spoken about it.1 In any case it is very easily misunderstood.
My idea is that any kind of sentimentality is worse than useless. The difficulty is not so much in the feeling that the public has about any one anti-social act. Through identification with the criminal or the anti-social person the public is often extremely sympathetic, and guilty on behalf of the criminal. Nevertheless there is, I am sure, a very real thing which we could call the unconscious revenge reservoir of a community. It would be possible to pass Acts of Parliament which ignore this revenge reservoir. In the extreme of this there would be incidents in which what is called lynch law would come into operation. In fact I would say that the function of judicial procedure is primarily one of preventing lynch law and it does this firstly by taking over responsibility for revenge and secondly by allowing for the cooling of tempers and the operation of objectivity.
I think that it is extremely difficult to get general recognition of this function of judicial procedure, especially amongst the legal profession, who tend to think of the law as a “thing,” or at best, an ass, and who fail to see in the judicial procedure expression of their own deep-seated feelings.
Holding these views, I feel that there is a great danger that the reforms which we are trying to bring about will be introduced by cold methods and then swept away by a wave of reaction. The judicial procedure must preserve its function.
Within this framework, I believe that there is room for the advances which psychiatry is beginning to be able to make, although only just begi